“I feel like I just got mugged. They are charging $6.97 for regular (other yelpers posted pics). The average price for gas in northern California is $3.43. I will never EVER go here again even though it’s on my way home from work, FRIENDS DON’T LET FRIENDS GO TO BRIDGEWAY GAS.”

ASSIGNMENT DESK: Send somebody, anybody up there to ask, “Hey, what’s the deal with the $8 gas?” Before that, buy a few gallons to see what the experience is like. Also, check for the purported dirtiness. Like “can you believe this is the bathroom of a gas station what charges* $200 to fill your** tank?!” And then you say, hey, I gots to fill up my right rear with air, and then see if Dude makes you pay for the privilege – well that’s agin the law, right? (But don’t send CW Nevius – he’d find a way to get rejected on this slam dunk, like he’d tell this story from the poor gas station owner’s ‘sperective, something like that. SPROOOOING off the rim, that’s what I’m talking about.) Anyway, engage, make it so.

*And call your economist buddy and ask about elasticities of demand for low-margin bidnesses. So let’s say the Shell down the street only makes a few pennies per gallon (and possibly makes more money selling high-margin snacks, you know, the way movie theaters do it), well, maybe it makes sense to cut your business by 95% if you can increase your margins by 10,000%, that kind of deal. Who knows, maybe Dude makes money some other way off of the property…

**I can remember the first time I paid $20 for a tank of gas. It was back in the 1990’s for a rusty Audi 5000 I bought from a doctor in Manoa Valley. And then back in the aughts, I remember paying $100 to fill the tank of a Land Cruiser up in, you guessed it, Marin County. I’ll remember the $200 threshold too, if and when I ever achieve it. (And if I filled up at Bridgeway today, I think I could almost, just almost make it to $200.)

As seen by photographer James Corrigan at a South San Francisco Costco yesterday, November 16th, 2014:

Granted, this is a membership-only warehouse so I guess you’d have to factor in the $55 annual membership, but prices are dropping like a stone lately – it’s only a matter of time before you’ll be able to purchase sub $3 gas in San Francisco proper…

I remember the first time I spent $20 to fill up a gas tank. It was for an Audi 5000 in Hawaii in the 1990’s.

And I remember the first time I spent $100 to fill a gas tank. It was for a Toyota Land Cruiser in Marin County in the 2000’s (by that, I mean The Aughts).

Ah mem’ries.

Now here’s present day SF, at the infamous Fell Street ARCO:

Now I’ll tell you, my Nana, who just had stomach surgery Back East, so she’s been slowed down a bit, well, she just told me about paying 30 cents per gallon for gasoline something like 60 years ago, back in ’54. Adjust that for inflation and that works out to two-something dollars a gallon, right?

And back then, America was a poorer country, right?

And back then, you couldn’t buy no hybrid cars to get super-high mileage, right?

Obviously, changes are afoot. Obviously. But the Peak Oil crowd (the latest gathering was circa 2007 or so) has been proven wrong, once again – it’s like clockwork, since the 1800’s.

Normally a small claims case is just that – small – in fact, barely an annoyance to large corporations because damages are limited. However, one small claims case pending in the Los Angeles area is certain to get a lot of attention because it will be going to trial just when approximately 200,000 Honda Civic Hybrid owners are opening their mailboxes to find notices of a proposed class action settlement where the Honda owners would get no more than $200 cash and the lawyers would get $8.474 million!

One disappointed Honda Civic Hybrid owner in California who got wind of the tiny settlement offer in advance chose to opt-out of the class and paid $75 to file a small claims case instead. The trial was set for January 3rd, six weeks before the 200,000 Civic owners are set to decide if they want to stick with the class action or file their own suits which can often be done quickly and cheaply without lawyers. (Think Judge Judy where regular people get up and give a 15 minute version of their complaint in plain English and then get a decision from the court). This case will be one of the first under the new 2012 law allowing individuals to sue for up to $10,000 in small claims court in California.

Honda has attempted four different legal maneuvers to postpone the trial until after the deadline had passed for Hybrid owners to opt-out of the class action, but the Judge said “no” all four times and the trial will proceed as originally scheduled on January 3rd. If the Plaintiff in that case wins and gets awarded thousands of dollars in damages, then Honda will have a lot of explaining to do to justify paying other Hybrid owners just enough to cover a few tanks of gas instead of replacing the defective hybrid batteries at $3,000 a pop – roughly $600,000,000.00!”